


Old Masters

by ThisCatastrophe



Series: Kankuro Week 2018 [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Discussion of emotions and feelings, Gen, Growing Up, Kankuro respects Sasori but recognizes that he's grown up to surpass him, Mentor/Protégé, Philosophy, of a fashion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-11
Updated: 2018-05-11
Packaged: 2019-05-05 09:50:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14615736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisCatastrophe/pseuds/ThisCatastrophe
Summary: For Kankuro Week Day 1: "Master of Puppets."A young Kankuro finds papers hidden in his new puppet. They belonged to someone wise, but maybe not as wise as he hoped.





	Old Masters

**Author's Note:**

> Hey. Short little thing for Kank week this time. Expect more soon.

He’s twelve, and he can’t read Old Sunan.

But he tries anyway. There’s a bundle of loose-leaf onionskin papers, all tied together with a brittle piece of twine, tucked into the hollow of Karasu’s left arm where there should be a blade or a vial of poison or something other than design notes. He knows exactly how important they are--he’s always been perceptive in his own cloudy-headed way--and he flattens them over several days before storing them in a box, carefully separated by tissue.

The librarian at the bunraku academy, the younger page who he can trust, the one who lets him into the advanced sections, says it’s master Sasori’s handwriting. There are reproductions on the west wall, schematics from his famous unfinished Enenra puppet, and even Kankuro’s untrained eyes see that, yes, this is the same hand. 

He borrows a book on Old Sunan translation and races home.

\--

Why Old Sunan, anyway?

He’s fifteen and restless. Kankuro slowly learns where the old characters transform into new ones, and then how the new ones relate to standard Japanese--it’s several steps, many long minutes and references back to that book he never returned to the academy library, just to research a single word.

But he can’t stop working. Every painstaking sentence is a glimpse into master Sasori’s life. 

Temari doesn’t understand. Gaara doesn’t care. He’s alone at the kitchen table most evenings, thumbing through the wafer-thin papers and trying to sort them into some sort of order.

Master Sasori becomes his companion. He’s an old friend.

\--

When he wakes, poison finally drawn out, he asks an attendant for the box under his bed. 

A nurse helps him set up his inkwell and the crowfeather quill, perched on a pumice dais normally used for meals and medicines. Across his lap, the papers and his notes, all clipped to a sheet of balsa wood, ready for his scrutiny.

He reads. He reads faster than he usually can--hearing master Sasori’s accent helps fit everything into place. He recalls the little bubble of air that Sasori placed between the “ts” and the “su” sound, not the slide Kankuro learned in lower academy; that’s the character tripping him up on the first page. Sasori’s notes use it liberally, as a thinking noise, or a distress sound--there’s sections where the character, its little almost-closed box, fills an entire line.

It’s a diary. These watermarks? Tear stains.

\--

He can’t resist reading the diary on the night before Naruto’s wedding.

As much as he always feels them, is ruled by them, emotions confuse Kankuro. Maybe that’s why he always turns to puppets; they’re simple, move until the end of your range of motion and never beyond, react only when instructed to, lie still until told otherwise.

And Konoha, it’s a flood, if his life in Suna was a drought. Everyone feels. He’s starting to feel the colors of emotion creep in at the seams. He watches Naruto at the bachelor party and his eyes feel misty.

What would master Sasori think?

He reads. He’s fluent in Old Sunan by now. Sometimes he catches himself calling puppetry parts by their archaic names, and nobody, not even the bunraku alive in Sasori’s time, understand. Some little-boy part of his mind is thrilled to speak the way master Chikamatsu might have.

And Sasori’s diary says nothing.

Hidden in the leaflet pages, Sasori’s recount of the Fourth Kazekage’s wedding. Careful, mechanical descriptions of flowers. Schematics of a wedding gown. Hateful, spiteful words aimed at a weeping grandmother. There are no tears on these pages, and there haven’t been in many, many years.

He treats his emotion like disease. When his tear ducts act up, he replaces them with wood. The pain in his back prompts an iron spine. His heart is the only thing he can’t rip out and substitute for gears.

But Kankuro thinks about the way his heart wrenches when he thinks about the wedding, and the way his chest aches to watch his sister with Shikamaru. He thinks about Sasori’s puppet body, hidden away in a scroll, and damnit, he loves the puppet like another brother, but he doesn’t want that eternal youth, the ever-wide eyes that never cry over a death or a sunset. He’s been a puppet before, in a fashion, the dutiful son following the criminal father, and he doesn’t want to go back.

As the sun rises he carefully separates the design schematics from the journal entries. A flame, curated in the palm of his hand, hovers over the diary for a long minute before a shaft of light chases away dark thoughts.

After the wedding, the Konoha librarian finds a packet of carefully-wrapped papers and a note on the Kazekage’s letterhead. “A gift,” it says of the enclosed journal, “from loving allies.”


End file.
